Three little-known ways to help the environment

MANILA, Philippines - So you want to keep doing your part to save the earth, but run out of places to plant trees in, and all your incandescent bulbs are now CFBs. Here are three easy steps that require little effort, but count a lot.

1. Keep your refrigerator full. If you don’t have an aircon, your refrigerator is the single largest energy hog in your home. Anything you do to run it more efficiently will count in your electricity bill.

Every time you open your refrigerator door, cold air from inside spills out and gets replaced by warm air. Each opening and closing leaves the ref slightly warmer and forces the compressor to work a little harder. You can minimize the loss of cold air by keeping the ref full. Groceries would be nice, but bottles of water will do just fine by taking up space that would otherwise be used by air that can spill out.

There is an energy cost the first time you do this because the bottles need to be cooled down, but keeping them in there will pay off in the long run. Those water bottles will not only help keep the temperature of the ref constant, but they will also help it stay cool much longer during a power outage. It will also take less energy to cool down the ref again when the electricity returns. That is, if you can resist drinking the water.

2. Don’t kill ants. Unless you are allergic to their sting, there are very good reasons not to reach for the insect spray each time you find ants at home.

First, there are no diseases associated with the ones you find at home. As nesting insects, ants secrete chemicals that kill bacteria that can harm the colony or, in some species, the fungi they farm as food. 

Second, ants clean up after you. They will attack the candy bar you forgot about, but they will also go after the tiny scraps that you cannot pick up. Those are the kinds of scraps that will attract flies, roaches and harmful microbes.

My old tenth-floor office in Ortigas looked clean in the daytime, but at night it crawled with hundreds of half-inch brown German cockroaches. With no ants to compete against them or lizards to feed on them, roaches flourished on unseen crumbs from box lunches and office parties. We sprayed the office periodically with pesticides, but they always came back.

In the warm humid environment of the Philippines, you shouldn’t expect your home to be free from cockroaches. But you will have a better chance of keeping their numbers in check, and reduce your exposure to pesticides, if you tolerate a few ant colonies. Think of them as low-maintenance pets.

3. Don’t wash your denims. After a Levi’s executive made this recommendation when asked how best to preserve their pants, I can now reveal to the world my secret that I have been doing this a long time without fear of being called a slob.

There really is not any reason to wash denims on a regular schedule. Water, detergents and exposure to the sun weaken fibers and fade colors. Discarding clothes isn’t good for the environment. And when you’re talking about expensive pants that fit well, you want to own them forever.

Keeping denims unwashed saves water and avoids the high energy expense of ironing. If a pair looks and smells fine after a day in them, air them out then wear them again. Using this look-smell test, it is not unreasonable to wash them only every few months (yes, months). This practice let me keep a few pairs for years until my growing waistline forced me to pass them down to my teenage son.

I do wash my jeans after fieldwork or anytime I sweat in them, but only mildly. No bleach, no scrubbing, and most important, no direct sunlight when drying. They come back still a little dirty, the way denims are supposed to be.  

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The author is program manager at the Manila Observatory and an associate professor at the Ateneo de Manila University. He now works as a senior scientist at AMEC Earth and Environmental in Calgary, Alberta in Canada.